When comparing Adventure Game Studio vs CryEngine, the Slant community recommends CryEngine for most people. In the question“What are the best 100% free and easy game engines for beginners?”CryEngine is ranked 8th while Adventure Game Studio is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose CryEngine is:

Pros

Pro

Easy to learn tool

Good for newbie game creators. Can be used for prototyping: on several occasions was used to make a demo/experimental version before creating a final commercial product on different engine.

Pro

Completely free and open source

AGS is licensed under Artistic License 2.0 and is completely free for use for creating both freeware and commercial games.

Pro

Relatively well documented

Besides the manual there are multiple text and video tutorials and code samples written by community.

Pro

Used for a number of high-profile commercial releases

Adventure Game Studio has been used to develop games such as "Resonance", "Blackwell" series, "Gemini Rue", "Primordia".

Pro

Lots of assets available

An extensive library of game templates and script modules accumulated over years. You can construct a simple game in hours (if you know what you are doing).

Pro

Friendly community

An old, big and active community which would support newcomers not only in learning basics of the engine, but can help with every aspect of game making (including art, voice acting, moral support, etc).

Pro

DX12, Vulkan support

CryEngine 5.4 now supports DX12 and Vulkan

Pro

C# integration

CryEngine has some C#template and also C# based system to write your function/ideas in to your game.

Pro

Dynamic water rendering

Cry Engine has realistic water effects that even simulate ocean physics. Features such as waves that respond to global wind, and dynamic water volume tessellation allow for some of the most realistic water effects available to a game developer. The engine also takes into account LOD (level of detail) on water geometry to allow it to stay performant for water at a distance.

Pro

Realistic rendering of vegetation and landscapes

Where Cry Engine really shines is with rendering scenes of nature. The Crysis games feature incredibly detailed vegetation and weather effects and it's the Cry Engine that enables that. The engine has many features to create a cohesive realistic looking world. Dynamic water effects allow users to have beautiful oceans, fog and cloud effects allow for realistic weather, and a plethora of lighting effects optimized for natural looking scenes make Cry Engine one of the best engines for creating vast beautiful landscapes.

By having all these features built together from the ground up, Cry Engine is capable of doing more complex effects more efficiently, than other engines that didn't have these effects planned from their inception.

Pro

Features allowing for realistic weather effects

Cry Engine has volumetric fog rendering which allows for realistic cloud shadows that actually render shadows onto the fog itself. Combined with their time of day system, it's possible to create incredibly realistic weather effects. On top of this, color grading allows user to post process pallets allowing them to change the color tone for different type weather, such as using a deep dark blue for rain.

Pro

Pay what you want payment model

Crytek has announced that beginning with Cryengine V, they will adapt a "Pay what you want" business model. This way the offer game developers everywhere total access to all of the engine's features and services for a price of their choosing. Plus they will have no obligation to pay royalties or additional fees for select services.

Developers who decide to make a contribution to Cryengine can choose to allocate up to 70% of that contribution to Crytek's new Indie Development Fund which is a grant program that will help support promising indie developers with their projects around the world.

Pro

Advanced volumetric cloud system

Cryengine has an optimized volumetric cloud system for Virtual Reality to give clouds full 3D spatial rendering. This ensures a high rendering quality with a minimal performance hit.

Pro

Disallows bad practices in asset creation

Simply by looking at the RC log when exporting can greatly improve your work. Cryengine doesn't handhold you constantly and helps greatly with avoiding bad practices in asset creation.

Pro

All platforms, including next-gen consoles, are supported

Pro

Versatile flow diagram script model

Flow graphs resemble flowcharts where each box represents a function or value, with connections between them representing program flow. This provides a better at-a-glance indication of game logic than a simple list of events, and makes complex behaviors easier to accomplish.

Pro

Dedicated channel for Q&A

Crytek has launched a dedicated Q&A forum for everything Cryengine related. It's called Cryengine Answers and it's a community dedicated to sharing and answering any question related to Cryengine.

Pro

VR support

Cryengine (starting on Cryengine V) has Virtual Reality support. Developers can create games with VR support for multiple platforms: PlayStation VR, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.

Pro

Online marketplace available

The Cryengine marketplace is an online marketplace which enables developers to access and use individual assets from thousands of materials, sounds and 3D objects created by the community. Even Crytek's own library assets are available there.

Cons

Con

Development is slow

Further development of the engine is currently slow, done by only few people in their free time.

Con

Assets cover almost exclusively adventure/quest genre

The features, script functions and game templates are very biased towards adventure/quest genre. The non-adventure games were made in AGS (2D shooters, platformers, turn-based strategies), but their development usually requires to write everything from scratch.

Con

No visual editor for scripts

You have to actually write all scripts yourself.

Con

AGS Script isn't as full-featured as other scripting languages

Its own scripting language has lower syntax capabilities compared to modern script languages.

Con

Workflow is closely coupled with the editor

Workflow is very tied to the editor and custom file formats, which can cause problems for bigger, more professional projects (interfering with source control, parallel development, automated builds, etc)

Con

Graphics renderer is a bit dated

Graphics renderer is not well optimized for high-resolution games and complex effects.

Con

Uses dated tech

Engine is based on the old technologies, which impose number of limitations and may cause problems on latest systems (level of annoyance varies depending on your priorities).

Con

Natively supports only 2D

2D only native support, 3D could be supported with plugins though.

Con

Steep learning curve

Con

No Mac OS X support

Con

Hard to develop games other than FPS

Cryengine is a great engine to be used for developing an FPS (and it's relatively easy to do so). But if you want to develop another type of game, it requires at least advanced knowledge of C++ and Visual Studio.

Con

Restrictive license

Cryengine is not restrictive anymore just more personalized. The model is Pay what you want and if you want more you get a membership with them. Or private support, help and lessons directly from the CryEngine team.